Lauren Marsolier : Dislocation

Galerie Richard, New York is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by Lauren Marsolier titled Dislocation from october 12 to November 20, 2016. Located somewhere between fiction and reality, her images represent a mental landscape affected by a world of constant change. They show an unreality, transitional non-places where human action and inhabitation are recorded in strange antitheses of nature and artifice, or, better still, artificial nature and natural artifice.

In a world where photographs are taken and shared in an instant, Marsolier’s images go through many stages and possibilities before finding their definitive form. Created from multiple photographs captured in a variety of locations, each composition is shaped slowly, over time, layer by layer, through trial and error. This approach allows her to represent the world photographically without showing a specific place, focusing instead on a mental experience. Hers is a kind of perceptual photography, exploring what is sensed rather than the immediately visible. In a composite photograph, liberated from the single point of view of indexical representation, a new visual vocabulary can emerge. A subtle combination of multiple perspectives, lighting sources, and distances is used to produce disorientation in the viewer. The landscapes are ambivalent, familiar and yet not identifiable. The work probes our relationship to a globalizing world, marked by the loss of its certainties and an overall sense of placelessness. It constructs an experiential bridge between self and environment, blending the physical landscape with the landscape of the mind. As art critic George Melrod put it, the work exists 'in a limbo-like, in-between state, between fiction and document, between virtual and physical reality. Collector William M. Hunt coined a new word to define her works: e-scapes (1).

Marsolier currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2015 she was included in a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London discussing contemporary landscape photography, along with Thomas Struth and other major photographers. Her work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her 2015 monograph Transition published by Kerber Verlag received International Photography Awards 2015 First Prize in the Fine Art Book category. Marsolier is the recipient of the 2013 Houston Center for Photography fellowship award, which included a solo exhibition of her work at the institution. In 2013, she was also featured in the London exhibition Landmark: The Fields of Photography, curated by William Ewing at the Somerset House. In 2013 she was featured in the British Journal of Photography as one of 20 photographers to watch. She was also part of the Humble Art Foundation 2012 selection of "31 Women in Art Photography". Her work has been reviewed in such magazines as Artforum, Art LTD, the Huffington Post to name a few.

(1) Here. Now. Nowhere. Essay by William M. Hunt published inTransition – Lauren Marsolier, Kerber Editions